Teaching and Learning

Instructional Excellence

The standard for Teaching and Learning in Lowndes County is excellence every day. The Department of Teaching and Learning is committed to empowering teachers by providing support of resources needed to meet the instructional needs of a diverse student population, Pre-Kindergarten - High School. The primary focus of all instructional programs in Lowndes County Schools is to provide quality work that is challenging.

We believe that every child can learn and should be afforded the opportunity to develop to their highest academic potential. To this end teachers and other instructional staff are provided high quality professional development training that focuses on student achievement.

The Lowndes County School System's curriculum, PK-12, is designed to ensure that all students have access to the same core of significant content at a specific instructional level, from teacher to teacher, and school to school.

State Releases 2017 GMAS Results

The Georgia Department of Education recently released system results and school results from the 2017 Spring administration of the Georgia Milestones Assessment System. The Georgia Milestones Assessment System (Georgia Milestones) is composed of two separate programs: the End of Grade (EOG) assessment for students in grades 3 through 8 and the End of Course (EOC) assessment for students taking any one of the eight high school End-of-Course courses.

The results from the Georgia Milestones will be used to communicate student achievement, to determine grade promotion (grades 3, 5, and 8), to determine the overall average in End-of-Course course, and to determine school and educator accountability. Unlike the previous testing programs, the Georgia Milestones requires students to answer multiple-choice and open-ended test items, and it incorporates increased writing at every grade level and in every course.

Georgia Milestones assesses student learning using four performance achievement levels. The purpose of the four performance achievement levels is to shift the focus from test scores to a progression of student learning.

As a reminder, while the Georgia Milestones and the CRCT both assess a student's understanding of the grade level content standards, the two sets of scores are not comparable. The Georgia Milestones and the CRCT are two different tests with two different achievement expectations. The CRCT established some of the lowest expectations for student proficiency in the nation. Because of the higher expectation established with the Georgia Milestones, it was expected that fewer students would score at the proficient or higher performance level.